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The Good Life

Former nurse has finger on pulse of her community

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She stands only 4 feet 5 inches tall, but Margaret “Bickie” Walters has had a sizable effect on
the Licking County village of Hebron.

Since turning 93 in May, she has hardly taken a break from helping others in the way she has
helped for seven decades.

She serves on three committees at Hebron New Life United Methodist Church, helps with church
dinners and other events, teaches Sunday school for adults and recently finished hosting her 18th
Bible study at home.

Outside church, she belongs to the Hebron Historical Society and the area Lions Club, which she
helped establish when she moved to town after finishing nursing school in 1941.

Much of her work, though, is less official: baking pies for friends, welcoming new residents,
sending letters and birthday cards.

Bubbly and talkative, she visits people who are ill, injured or in mourning because she wants
people to know they’re loved. After the visits, she said, “I never know who feels better: they or
I.”

One recipient of her attention was Teresa Carman, who hadn’t attended the church since
childhood. While Carman, 49, recovered at her mother’s home in Newark from a serious car accident,
Walters visited her twice without being asked to do so.

“To her, this is how you live your life,” Carman said. “Her life is not about her as much as it
is about her community.”

The oldest of five children raised on a farm in tiny Gratiot, about 45 miles east of Columbus,
Cora Margaret Bickle pursued a desire to care for others by enrolling in the School of Nursing at
what was then Grant Hospital.

There, she received the permanent nickname of “Bickie.” Classmates thought her name was too big
for someone of such small stature.

After marrying bus driver Gail Walters and settling in Hebron, she worked as a nurse and nursing
educator for almost 45 years — her positions having included director of nursing at the old Newark
Hospital and director of training and education for nurses at Grant.

For a few years before her 1985 retirement, Walters had a patient at home: her husband, who used
a wheelchair after suffering a stroke. He died in 1992, his wife having cared for him for 13
years.

Walters then increased her involvement at church and began serving meals at the Salvation Army
and volunteering as a receptionist for Hospice of Central Ohio. She stopped working with the last
two organizations a decade ago, after she fell at home and broke a hip.

These days, she is in good health, although she has a heart condition and gets short of breath.
She and her husband didn’t have children; Walters receives help around the house from neighbors
along with a nephew and her youngest brother — both 83.

She has activities written on her calendar almost every day and drives her 20-year-old Chevrolet
Lumina everywhere (but gets a ride to church, to save the parking spots for others).

Anyone who doesn’t know Walters, said Mayor Clifford L. Mason, must be new to Hebron. The
village declared her 90th birthday “Margaret ‘Bick’ Walters Day,” officially proclaiming that she
makes “every person feel as if she has been waiting to see you and that you are the highlight of
her day.”

Mason, a former next-door neighbor, calls her one of the people he adores most.

“She has given so selflessly of her life to help others in any way imaginable,” he said. “There
are countless people in this community who have had a better life because of Bickie Walters.”